People With Fourth Grade Education Support AIG

Some crazy fourth grade teacher in Texas (*Texas joke*) allowed her young charges to write sympathy notes to AIG, of all places, which made AIG execs absolutely weepy. Public education fails again:

Rebecca Chapman was teaching her kids about rapacious capitalism and its miscontents by getting them all mad about AIG's excesses, but then, as good teachers do, she turned the tables:

"What if you were an AIG employee?" she asked. Imagine if you had not been involved in the deals that ruined the company but were left to clean up the mess. What if you had to pay back money you felt you had earned? What if your family had received death threats?

One boy raised his hand.

"Can we write them and let them know that it's going to be okay?" asked the boy, who clearly doesn't have a 401(k).

Oh Christ, obviously the correct answer to that is "NO you may not, what are you, a Republican?" But this was in Texas, so they let the kids do it, and it was literally the only good thing that happened to AIG this entire year so far:

"There were more than a few moist eyes and tight throats," employee Patrick O'Neill wrote back to the class. "To have reached out to us in such a heartfelt way is really a testament to your individual and collective humanity."

Gerry Pasciucco, the current leader of AIG-FP, also wrote to say that the gesture had deeply touched his battered staff. He signed off with a simple message:

"Fourth graders rule!"

In a movie the world would now hug AIG and we'd all move forward as friends, but in the real world this just causes people to seethe in populist anger more. Where are the letters to the poors?